Friday, October 29, 2010

The past two weeks I did a unit study on spiders. I really don't like spiders that much so it was a little hard. I sucked up being a baby about it and enjoyed teaching and learning about spiders. I started the unit by graphing each student's opinion of liking spiders or not liking spiders.

I could not believe they all said they liked spiders! I was afraid they were just saying it because that is what their friend said. I asked if I were to bring live spiders and put them all around the room the next day would they be okay with it or not (they did ask the next day where the spiders were). The next morning I had a student raise his hand and ask if he could change his spider because he decided he really didn't like spiders! I found a great unit online about spiders. I am sorry I can't tell you what the website was because I don't remember! Sorry! I will keep looking for it. I got some good ideas from the unit and I also went to our public library and checked out a "story bag." Our library has tons of these bags on different themes. I was lucky to find one about spiders. There were great non fiction books and some fiction. We learned lots of interesting facts about spiders.
We learned all about the body of a spider and the features spiders have. We learned that they eat insects. An idea from the unit I used was to have students look at pictures of different insects and spiders and decided if it is an insect or a spider. If we couldn't tell by looking we just counted the legs.
My sister's friend from school brought me some spider cut outs from her mom. They were so cute, and I wanted to make sure I used them in as many ways as I could.
I gave each student a spider and each drew pictures with the spider on his paper. They turned out really cute. I loved to see where they decided to put their spider. Some put the spider on its web, some were in the garden, and some were hanging from its silk!

To finish our unit we wrote all the facts we learned about spiders and put them on our web!